[PRWC Party Documents] Pomeroy's Portrait: Revisionist Renegade, April 22, 1972

Pomeroy's Portrait: Revisionist Renegade

Anti-Marxism and Eclectism

III. Guerrilla Warfare Raised To The Level Of Marxist-Leninist Theory And Strategy

Basahin sa Pilipino

Amado Guerrero

April 22, 1972

Revolutionary School of Mao Tse Tung Thought, Communist Party of the Philippines

In the early period of the Agrarian Revolutionary War of the Second Revolutionary Civil War, Chairman Mao laid the basic tactics of guerrilla warfare as follows: "The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue." Guerrilla war tactics were further developed during the War of Resistance Against Japan. As a matter of fact, guerrilla warfare as a whole was raised to the level of strategy. In the extended stage of strategic stalemate in the war of resistance, guerrilla warfare played the role in arousing the broad massses of the people on a nationwide scale and in fighting the militarily superior enemy. It played the decisive role in the mulitiplication, tempering and maturation of the fighting units that could subsequently be raised to the level of regular mobile forces in the later period of the war of resistance and during the Third Revolutionary Civil War. In the rich experience of the people's war in China, we can draw the universal lesson that guerrilla warfare does not only prepare for but also serves as constant auxiliary for regular mobile warfare.

Having been raised to the level of Marxist-Leninist theory and strategy by Chairman Mao, guerrilla warfare has become a powerful revolutionary weapon in the hands of oppressed peoples who have to contend with far stronger and better equiped modern armies of imperialism and the reactionaries. By the large, guerrilla warfare has ceased to be something that can be used with success by revolutionaries and reactionaries "alike".

What now determines the basic character of guerrilla warfare in this epoch is its employment by revolutionary forces in the world's countryside. The U.S. counter-guerrilla tactics, banditry or any attempt at guerrilla warfare without its integration with the building of the revolutionary party, united front, rural base areas, mass organizations and organs of democratic political power is bound to fail in the face of genuine revolutionary guerrilla warfare in line with Chairman Mao's theory of people's war.

Guerrilla warfare became on an unprecedented world scale the weapon of the oppressed nations and downtrodden masses during and after World War II. In the Philippines, however, the Jose-Jesus Lava leadership of the old merger party failed to use it well. Failing to recognize and master the Marxist-Leninist character given to guerrilla warfare by Comrade Mao Tsetung, this opportunist leadership adopted in 1950 the "Left" opportunist line of "quick military victory" and ordered small guerrilla units, with a total troop strength of no more than five thousand, to take the "strategic offensive" against the enemy. Under the slogan of "all-out armed struggle", this leadership did not pay attention to the step-by-step building of the Party, people's army and the united front; and to the step-by-step raising of the level of armed struggle on the basis of the agrarian revolution and the building of revolutionary bases.

Going by his brief and narrow experience with the Jose-Jesus Lava leadership, Pomeroy always strains to express disdain for guerrilla warfare. He goes so far as to invoke the names of Marx and Engels in an attempt to preclude guerrilla warfare from the range of strategy and tactics available to the proletariat and its revolutionary party, especially in the world's countryside. He writes:

... Although Marx and Engels approved of guerrilla warfare as a form of popular struggle, neither of them tended to link it with working class tactics of gaining the power, which were thought of it in terms of insurrection in which the organized masses of the people would be brought into play in decisive action at decisive moments.

Pomeroy presents himself in a dogmatic posture as one being for the use of urban insurrection alone in revolutionary armed struggle. But behind this posture is his calculation that since urban insurrection is not immediately possible for the people in colonies and semi-colonies then he can insists that they should not all engage in parliamentary struggle as the sole or main form of struggle for a protracted and indefinite period of time. This what we call "Left" in form but Right in substance. Completely unmasking himself, he contends:

The prominence of armed struggle in liberation movements in many countries should not obscure the fact that independence from imperialist rule has been gained in a large number of cases by other means, including general strikes, mass demonstrations and political organization and agitation that has made popular sentiment undeniably clear.

He goes so far to consider as having peacefully and truly become independent those countries whose "independence" has been "granted" by the imperialists or is the result of compromises between the imperialist countries and the local bourgeoisie, especially those elements that are or that are to become big comprador-bureaucrats. Pomeroy puts himself into ridicule by engaging in this mendacity and also by resorting to some futile juggling of terms: "In these independent states the revolutionary or liberation process may not have been completed by the act of independence alone... He also considers of "great satisfaction to Marxists" for countries to have no Marxist-Leninist leadership and to take "non-capitalist paths" ruled by U.S. imperialism, Soviet social-imperialism and local comprador-bureaucrat capitalism.

Pomeroy wants to paint a large picture of defeat for the oppressed peoples of the world. By sheer verbiage, he wishes to convince everyone that the temporary defeats in some countries far outweigh the large and solid victories of people's war in China and other countries. He also disregards the fact that where temporary defeats are suffered the revolutionary forces can always strive to recover and persist in revolutionary armed struggle until victory is won. He babbles:

The spectacular success of the guerrilla warfare in a number of liberatiom struggles -- especially in China, Vietnam, Algeria and Cuba -- has tended to gloss over the fact that several major guerrilla struggles were defeated in the same period, the most important being Malaya, the Philippines, Greece, Burma and Kenya, while serious setbacks, at the least, have been given to guerrilla attempts launched in the Congo, Peru, Bolivia,and elsewhere. It is quite evident from this that broad and universal generalizations about the efficacy of armed struggle or guerrilla tactics cannot safely be made.

The safe generalization that Pomeroy obviously wants to make is that armed counter-revolution and bourgeois pacifism are efficacious.

Pomeroy pictures the revolutionary forces are being passive, lacking in initiative and merely waiting to be compelled to wage armed struggle. He prates:

Every liberation movement has preferred to use peaceful, legal means to win freedom. These popular movements, denied such means of expressing themselves and met by an increasing use of violence by the desperate and crumbling imperialist system, have literally been commpelled to adopt violent methods to gain popular ends.

He wants "preparations for armed struggle" to be done only when "all other doors to legal, peaceful ways of effecting change have been slammed shut" -- when " warranted by the behavior of the reactionary class forces". To further support his revisionist stands, Pomeroy takes advantage of the patent failure of Ernesto "Che" Guevarra and Regis Debray to serve up the "Cuban model" as the "universal model" for armed revolution surpassing the Chinese revolution. He gloats over the failure of the Latin American Organization of Solidarity (OLAS) to promote the "Cuban model" and also that of Guevarra and Debray in their Bolivian adventure which did not attend correctly to the task of Party building, united front building and mass work as the necessary support for the armed struggle. Ostensibly to overwhelm the excerpts from Castro, Guevarra and Debray, those excerpts from the counter-revolutionary revisionists JuanRodriguez,Alberto Gomez, Jose Manuel Fortuny, Jose Cuello and Asdrubal Dominguez and Luis Corvalan are made to hog the entire section on Latin America.

These Latin American revisionists and Right opportunists give support to Pomeroy's idealist and opportunist line of "combining all forms of struggle" without giving the attention to the principal form of struggle and to the strategic aim of seizing political power; beating up the straw figure that is "all-out armed struggle" or "guerrilla movement alone"; supporting the "lesser evil", oftentimes the puppet clique in power which is rapidly being isolated; and laying the principal stress on urban peaceful struggle for the sake of urban uprisings in the future and of concessions from the reactionaries in the meantime.

In attacking guerrilla warfare as a revolutionary method, Pomeroy wants the revolutionary forces in the world,s countryside to vaccilate between hoping indefinitely for city insurrections based on the imagined conditions similar to the revolutionary situation in the October Revolution and starting guerrilla warfare only on the basis of a "revolutionary situation" that Pomeroy wants to sound mysterious about. At any rate, his consistent view is to have mass movements engage in protracted peaceful and legal struggle. In this regard, he has excessive praise for such revisionist parties and revisionist writers as those represented in the section on Latin America in his compilation. He pictures them as being for armed struggle but anyhow as being still in the stage of preparing indefinitely for it peacefully or in the stage of withdrawing from previous armed struggles. He evaluates his revisionist colleagues as of higher worth than the great revolutionary leaders of, say, China and Indochina.

Why does Pomeroy advocate protracted peaceful struggle in opposition to Chairman Mao's theory of protracted people's war in the world's countryside? He makes that since U.S. imperialism is capable of recognizing "realities" (particularly the superpower maneuvers of the Soviet Union and the peaceful mass movements) its aggressive nature will eventually change. He chatters:

Popular armed struggles of today have been shaped largely by the imperialist tactics of violence, and the forms of struggle in the coming period will be affected to a considerable extent by the degree to which imperialist is forced to recognize the realities in the changed balance of power. Some revolutionaries would contend that American imperialism is rigidly incapable of aknowledging such a fact or of doing anything to meet it other than what it is doing today. However, a Marxist-Leninist, while today for any form of struggle, must also be prepared for the complexity of change.

By that "complexity of change" (a mystifying phrase denoting the incapability of "dividing one into two"), Pomeroy contends that U.S. imperialism will change its nature.

Pomeroy completely exposes himself as an agent of U.S. imperialism. He mocks what the he calls the "apocalyptic vision" that imperialism and capitalism are being besieged and smothered in a mounting crescendo of guerrilla wars. He insinuates that those who hold the view that the world revolutionary situation is excellent are not Marxist-Leninists and are swayed by "emotion and temperament". He claims as having a static essence" the general formulation that imperialism and the capitalist system as whole are in a state of crisis and that the present epoch is a positive vitality that he can imagine and wishes to render the revolutionary forces to become static before such a moribund and decadent monster. He disagress with the view that now is the era of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought, when imperialism is heading for total collapse and socialism is marching towards worldwide victory. He consistently refers to the particularity of certain countries as an empiricist would with the mechanistic end of the separating the particular from the general or universal.

Crudely taking sides with U.S. imperialism, Pomeroy argues that the revolutionaies have only themselves to blame for waging armed struggle whenever U.S. imperialism attempts to crush them militarily. He rails threateningly that "those who become overly committed to ideas of armed struggle" will surely become the destroyed or forced to difficult retreats. He boasts of the power of U.S. imperialism in the following manner: "Imperialist counter-insurgency operations have been designed especially to take advantage of this type of error." Sweepingly, he calls armed struggle "this type of error".

He boasts of the adcanced militarily technology of imperialism and tries to blackmail the people with its supposed efficacy in surppressing movements. He quacks:

Attempts by imperialism in the contemporary period to suppress revolutionary movements by using the the most advanced military technology -- helicopters, napalm, chemical warfare, electronic devices -- bear comparison with the use of then-new military developments to drive revolutionary movements off the streets in the time of Marx and Engels, over 100 years ago.

Resorting to nuclear blackmail in an oblique manner, Pomeroy also poses as one extremely concerned about U.S. imperialism being forced by revolutionary armed struggles to start an atomic war. He jabbers:

The changes could bring an atomic conflict between the socialism and imperialism -- a type of armed struggle that the socialist countries and the communist movement internationally seek to prevent because of the catastrophic effect it would have on mankind in general.

While Pomeroy would like to fighten the people with the military technology and nuclear weapons of the U.S. imperialism , he would also like them to believe that the world capitalist system would soon be left undefended by any capitalist power and that U.S. imperialist itself, the chief defender of such a system, is just about to abandon its role of gendarme out of sheer sympathy for mass struggles to find no more use for armed struggle, particularly guerrilla warfare. He prates:

French and British imperialism have already been forced in this direction and American imperialism, with divisions in its ranks over the cost of wars of suppression, is not immune from it.

He prates further:

It is unreal ... to contend that it [police role of U.S. imperialism] cannot be altered by mass struggle against it, and it is obvious that in each of the possibilities of changes in the world situation a diversity of forms of struggle would present themselves to revolutionary movements, of which guerrilla warfare would only be one.

Next only to Pomeroy as a brazen supporter of U.S. imperialism in the compilation is Henry Winston of the revisionist renegade Communist Party of the United States of America who preaches to the Afro-American people to those their militance, love the Uncle Toms and peacefuly demand additional black representation on all levels of the imperialist state. Like Pomeroy, Winston warns the Afro-American people to stop their "terrorism" and "provocations" lest the white supremacists crush them. To him Pomeroy gives the privilege of putting the final touch on this book.